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Marlize Joubert

I went to an extraordinarily powerful breathwork class at Unplug Meditation the other day. After class, I asked the teacher “What inspired you to start on the path of teaching breath work and how has it changed your life?”

“When I moved to Los Angeles in the year 2000, I kinda felt like I was losing myself. I was moving out for a guy. I knew that I needed to come back to something that was mine, but I was having a lot of internal struggle and lots of confusion around who I am and what I want and where I’m going because I was always focusing on other people.

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I also knew that I had a lot to offer but I had no idea what that is. I’ve always been on a healing journey in pursuit of myself by running away from my self, you know?

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So just before I left to almost moving back to South Africa after being here quite a few years, an astrologer told me to take a person’s class. They said we had very similar charts and stuff so they thought there was something there for me.

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I walked in and we were sitting in a big circle and my teacher David Elliott walked around and it was just a connection. When we looked in each other’s eyes there was a connection and it was like a instant recognition. I was like ‘what the hell’. And then I lay down and he showed me the breath and we got into it and it and for the first time in my life I felt like I was home.

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And I wanted more. It feels like a drug. It was really confronting and really freaking scary but even in just one session it changed my life. He taught me tools to recognize what I have as a gift so I can learn how to ground and enjoy who I am as a person and then support other people.”

“Who do you love most and what do you love about them??

“Oh wow what an interesting question. So I met a beautiful guy that I’ve been with now for almost 9 months and he is me in a male body. And for the first time in my life, I actually feel it okay to kind of be myself in front of him because there’s an understanding around it. It’s almost like a like a secret joke that we get each other. And it’s a balance between insecurity and confidence, or shyness and being the leader, at the same time, with the sensitivity and the power. So there’s a lot of really intense extremes, but they come together as a union. And it’s about juggling…juggling extremes and finding the balance with a man. It’s always been hard for me, because of who I am, for anybody else to understand that part of me, and to meet someone like that is amazing.”